


In Another Place I'm A Different Man

by gala_apples



Series: Some Day, A Suit [1]
Category: White Collar
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-20
Updated: 2013-10-20
Packaged: 2017-12-29 22:46:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1011014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gala_apples/pseuds/gala_apples
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five reasons Neal Caffrey left St. Louis before graduation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Another Place I'm A Different Man

Neal’s been too smart for high school since junior high. 

He’s never bothered with an IQ test. They’re racially biased, and even though he’s the race they favour, Neal can’t consider it worthwhile information. It’s like... it’s like hustling pool, selling people on their own self-worth. The test is selling intelligence to nerds, and faking bad at pool is selling street cred to wanna be bad men, and their girlfriends. Neal’s the hustler, not the hustlee.

That doesn’t change the facts though. He’s good in all facets of thinking; memorising facts, extrapolating from things already known, recognising his own assumptions, working columns of numbers in his head, varying the language he uses depending on who he’s explaining something to. Add that to skimming his textbooks on the first day of school and reading great literature for entertainment, and there isn’t much he doesn’t already know by the time it’s assigned in class.

By the first semester of junior year he’s already used all available art credits. He can retake one of the classes, if he wants, but it’s not another credit, only a chance to better his grade. Seeing as Neal’s got A’s in every one, there’s not much point. That leaves his electives running the gamut from unpalatable to soul crushingly boring. The less said about his compulsories, the better.

He thinks, sometimes, about home schooling. Officially sanctioned independant study would be much less of a hassle than begging some of his more liberal teachers to let him read what he wants, provided he can prove he already knows what material they’re currently learning. The flipside of that coin is having to be at home all day. That’s not really an option.

Or maybe the coin is a misdirect, to distract from a third choice. Maybe he doesn’t have to pick school or home. That’s something to think about too.

***

Neal’s hardly the first student in the history of formal education to find school boring, even pointless. The difference between him and the average cynical better-than-thou teenager is his utter lack of friends. Most students who don’t want to be in school cut class and spend the hour with their friends in the cafeteria, talking and playing cards with their five closest burn outs. Neal doesn’t have group of people who hate the same things that he does.

His school has a little under two thousand students. There should be enough room for every clique, for every oddball and spaz. Maybe there is. There’s certainly no lack of cheerleaders, or stoners, or jazz banders. What there is most assuredly not room for is a sixteen year old who’s more interested in renaissance art than in MTV. 

Neal doesn’t fit in. Not just for the obvious reason, although that endears him to nobody. He doesn’t fit in when it comes to basic stuff, like what he’d want to do on the weekend, if hypothetical friends were doing a poll. Ask ten random students, their answers would be going to a movie, roller skating, doing homework, getting drunk in a children’s park. In the last year Neal’s spent approximately fifty weekends at whatever museums and galleries a combination of subway, rail, and bus can get him to. If you ask him, a day trip to Laumeier Sculpture Park is about thirty million times more interesting than roller skating.

No one else here cares about culture. No one else even seems to realise they’re uncultured. He can’t help but yearn for Paris, Amsterdam, Morocco.

***

Carrie’s a great girlfriend. She’s great in a dozen different ways, not limited to but including imaginative in bed, smarter than the vast majority of their classmates, and moderately interested in art. Of course, those are the qualities that will lose him her. Such is the way of the universe.

Neal lost his virginity to her. It was a mutual deflowering, actually. It was much more uncomfortable on his side than hers. She didn’t run to the bathroom and turn the tap on full blast so her crying couldn’t be heard. 

Over the last six months Neal’s developed a repertoire of things Carrie likes. She shakes when she’s aroused, practically convulses when she comes. It should be disturbing, getting a reenactment of The Exorcist in bed. It’s not. It’s sexy, and Neal has a mental catalogue of everything he’s done that’s made her flail. Her own creativity allowed them to find something that would work for him. Neal’s more grateful for that than he can say. But it’s a double edged sword. It seems like every week she comes up with something new he can’t do.

Carrie’s not solidly brilliant, like he is. She’s smart though. Smart enough to understand most subjects easily, and likeable enough that she goes to class for the group discussion. She doesn’t need the material explained, she just likes talking it over with the other students that haven’t sunk into perpetual ennui. She doesn’t understand Neal’s boredom, and thinks the idea of homeschooling or dropping out altogether is horrifying.

One of her best qualities is that she gets sudden flashes of insight, especially when it comes to people. She’s going to be a therapist or a corporate mediator, Neal’s sure of it. She could make Pepsi and Coke get along. The problem lies in repetition. Once Carrie understands the motivations for something her interest wanes. The downside is it has bad impact on their shared culture. Once she’s ‘solved’ the intent of a work of art she’s done with it, doesn’t need to see it again. That’s essentially the opposite of Neal’s feelings towards masterpieces. She is an art critic. He is an art collector, at least in his heart.

A break up is on the horizon. It’s pretty clear to him, and if he’s seen it no doubt she has. But they keep putting it off, keep convincing themselves better tomorrow than today because it’ll hurt when they finally say the words. It’ll be Neal’s first break up. If mainstream media is in any way right, he’ll need to cry over beer and go to see stripppers so he’s not miserable every time he sees her face. Or...

Or he could just get outta dodge. Her face is in St Louis, not anywhere else.

***

His dad is a dirty cop.

Never mind just not having died taking down a whole gang of criminals. Neal is sixteen, he can deal with his father not being the perfect hero of an oft repeated bed-time story. He doesn’t believe in dragons or talking pigs anymore either. 

Never mind just skimming off the top. It’s a crime, sure, but everyone poaches from work. Cabbies drive passengers off book, senators put seven course meals down as a work expense, secretaries keep their purses supplied with pens and paper. Taking the occasional seized good is just a variation of that. 

Nope, darling dad is the creme de la creme, a cop corrupt enough to murder another cop. And that is not okay. Neal’s not okay with being lied to his entire childhood. He’s not okay with having an ultimately despicable idol. He is most certainly not okay with having been taken to the woods and taught how to shoot pop cans, being told the entire time that they’re bad guys. How Mom could ever look at a gun again, he doesn’t know.

Being a cop no longer seems like a viable option. It was already iffy, considering his physical issues, but a month ago he would have been willing to fake it until he made it. Now the idea of a gun in his hand makes him sick. But that’s exactly what’s expected from him, here.

***

Ellen is the only person who consistently calls him Neal.

He figured out his problem four years ago. It was around the onset of puberty, when his body begin doing utterly insane things without his permission. All his friends’ bodies were doing the same things; growing breasts, widening hips, menstruating. Some of them didn’t like certain aspects. Neal -Dani, then- was the only one who had daily outbursts of misery. It was wrong. Every inch of his body was wrong, from head to toe. And it was wrong that it felt wrong. Mom had spent the last eight years telling her she’d grow out of wanting to be a boy. Once she was a teenager, getting her first crush and trying on makeup for the first time, she’d put away childish complaints.

But she hadn’t. She’d just felt more and more miserable. Angry, and sad, and scared. All her friends had started dressing to impress boys; tighter clothes and alluring neon. She’d gone in the other direction, the plainest, baggiest clothes stores had. Figuring out the ace bandage thing had been her biggest coupe. 

Eventually she’d realised that her problem had a name. You go to the library often enough and you can find out anything. She’d used it only once, telling her mom and Ellen. He’d come out of that conversation with exactly one ally. An ally with no official guardianship over him.

Since then Neal’s been trying to make other people understand. Stupid, really. No one ever does. Carrie is one of the rare few who tries, but at least three times out of five she slips and calls him Dani, or a partial syllable of it before correcting herself. 

He can’t help but think that in a bigger city, like San Francisco or New York there will be people who know how he feels. After all, his disorder has a name. They wouldn’t bother to name it if only a few people in the world thought they were born in the wrong body.


End file.
